


Let's Face the Music and Dance

by kylee



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Dancing, Families Lost and Found, M/M, Sweeping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 05:23:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1066259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kylee/pseuds/kylee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There's always a ball. And there's always an invitation requesting the presence of the Champion. What there usually isn't is a handsome elf on my arm."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let's Face the Music and Dance

When Hawke first said it, Fenris assumed he was joking. The man did little other than joke, whether from genuine mirth or ill-concealed terror -- or perhaps from relief, after a kiss three years coming, smiling down at Fenris and saying, "Looks like the Champion will have an escort in time for the ball."

Fenris's experience as an escort was limited. If he had been taken to a Tevinter ball, it was as a leashed wolf, a lyrium toy to intimidate and impress his master's peers. It was not experience he cared to remember or repeat, but he doubted he would impress the nobles of Kirkwall, however intimidated they inevitably were by him.

"I'm acquainted with few Antivans," answered Fenris. "Who is this one?" Knowing Hawke, it was an apostate who needed help.

"It's a dance," said Hawke with a bright and blazing laugh. "You're a choreographer in your own right, of course, but you know the nobility -- only interested in last age's innovations. You might want to pick up a few for the ball."

An apostate might have been preferable. "I wasn't aware," Fenris said at length, brows raised to their height, "that there was an actual  _ball_."

"There's always a ball. And there's always an invitation requesting the presence of the Champion. What there usually isn't is a handsome elf on my arm."

"Perhaps your 'handsome elf' doesn't wish to be paraded around Hightown," suggested Fenris.

"Not paraded -- danced. Surely I'll make a better partner than the shadows and skeletons in that mansion of yours?"

"I don't know whether you recognize it when it isn't your own, but when I said I danced, that was sarcasm. I don't dance. I never have."

A beatific smile lit up Hawke's face. "Would you like to learn?"

"It's not a flaw you need to emend. You don't have to take pity on the wretched slave by exposing him to higher culture --"

"No, but I'd  _like_ to share something with my lover." Hawke's smile never faltered. He extended a hand. "May I?"

Slowly, so slowly he might have drawn back at any moment, Fenris lifted his hand and laid it in Hawke's. "If you insist."

 

* * *

 

There was space enough between the shelves for a dance lesson, and Hawke promised the library would be private. "No one but me will see your stumbling," he told Fenris. "And I won't laugh. Much." In the same room where they would sit and sound out letters, they put aside their armor (for "ease of movement"), and Fenris retied the red favor around his wrist. Once it would have discomfited him, to have his arms otherwise bare -- perhaps it would still discomfit him, were he anywhere but the Hawke Estate. But Hawke left little time for reflection. 

Hawke demonstrated the steps -- he made them look easy -- _right, left, right, left, and leap._ He kicked the air with a rogue's grace and a rogue's aplomb. He urged Fenris to follow.

"You have the legs for it," he said. "Don't be afraid to show them off."

"I am not in the habit of  _showing off_ ," said Fenris, landing from a leap, feeling absurd.

"Says the man who glows blue in battle."

"Not by choice," he snapped. "You skulk in shadows because you can, but I cannot hide what has been branded into me."

"I know," Hawke conceded, hands raised in surrender. "I know. But you can throw yourself into a fight. Why not throw yourself into the dance?"

"There's an end to a fight. There's an obstacle dealt with.  _This_  is ..."

At once Hawke burst into ringing laughter. "Useless?"

"Yes," Fenris replied with caution, "but I fail to see the humor of it."

"I remember Carver when our mother taught us -- how he complained that it wasn't useful. We weren't going to a ball in Kirkwall, we were hiding from the Order in Lothering. As far as he was concerned, mother never let him do anything useful." Hawke couldn't repress a smile. "That's the lot of a younger brother, I suppose."

With a keen and sudden interest he could not explain, Fenris asked, "To never do anything useful?"

"To want to. To see the responsibilities your elders are saddled with and wish you had more of the same. To take up the sword, train for war, risk your life."

_And lose it._ For the first time (or what he told himself was the first time) Fenris tried to imagine it -- what it must have been like, to be a younger brother, and yearn to prove he could take of those around him as well as be taken care of by them -- what a brother would do, if he could use what strength he had to save his family --

Of course he'd never met Carver (or a boy named Leto with a sister and a mother). Of course he couldn't imagine.

"Your brother had a point," he said instead.

" _To_  a point yes. Dancing is useless. It's movement for the sake of movement, contact for the sake of contact. And that's the joy of it. After we'd spent our childhood running and hiding, can you blame mother for wanting to give us something frivolous, instead of another thing to fear? Bethany had the most to fear out of the three of us, but you should have seen the way her face lit up when you spun her across the cottage floor."

Bethany, Fenris had met.  _Nobody asks for their fate._  "A life of running and hiding with no room for frivolity," he said. "It does sound familiar."

"And do you recommend it?"

"No. I don't believe I do."

As though to clear it, Hawke shook his head, and shot Fenris a grin. "Empathy for a mage. I'm surprised at you, Fenris."

"Empathy for your sister. Aside from that," he said, "it's not as though I've never enjoyed anything useless. Wicked Grace, for instance."

"You certainly don't play it for the money, from what Varric's been telling me. Here, let me show you the next bit." With a sliding step, Hawke drew closer. "If I may?"

It startled Fenris like a sudden touch -- the offer of one, the request for permission. "You may," he said. "If nothing else, you've roused my curiosity."

"It's my life's purpose," Hawke said, his arms circling Fenris's shoulders. "Now, if you'll put your arm around my waist ... Like that. Not so hard, is it?"

If for a moment Fenris felt awkward in the pose, in the next Hawke leaned against him, a warm and somehow assuring weight at his side. "Is this the contact for the sake of contact, then?" 

"Absolutely. Contact and spinning."

"And how is the spinning done?" asked Fenris, wary -- and yet still curious. Hawke had not yet failed his life's purpose.

"Easily enough. I'm going to leap, and you're going to lift and turn with me."

"You've a strange view of 'easy,' Hawke."

"Easier to do than talk about. Come on --"

And with that scant warning, Fenris felt Hawke's weight shift and sway forward. On instinct his arm tightened around the man's waist, not for the dance but to keep him from falling -- to keep him flying, as his feet left the ground, no support but a partner who for some reason followed him into every mad venture. Their turn was quick, clutching, clumsy, but at its end Hawke was laughing.

"There!" he declared, and hugged Fenris to his chest. "You swept me off my feet."

" _You_ nearly bowled me over." But there could be no real bite in it, with Hawke so giddy. Not when he felt his own lips lifting.

"We can work on that." Untangling an arm, Hawke brushed his fingers to Fenris's cheek. "There's time yet. We can try different holds, different lifts, and once we've got the steps, we can practice to music. Orana plays the lute."

"All in preparation for your ball?"

"If you'd like to go. Would you like to go?"

"You might have asked that before announcing me your escort," Fenris scoffed. "It seems a waste of time, but no more than any other waste of time you've taken me to. And I would like to be at your side. It ... flatters me, to think you would want me. Even when I have no idea why."  _If not as a beast, if not as a toy ..._

"That's only the beginning of how I want you," Hawke said, between a laugh and a kiss laid under Fenris's ear. "And I told you why. I want to share something with my lover. My father evaded the templars and stole a set of Orlesian robes to dance with my mother -- it's in my blood."

"Even your tales of romance involve mages escaping the Circle," Fenris observed, wry.

"It's the tale I grew up on," said Hawke without shame.

"That explains much about you."

"Doesn't it? That was the night mother decided to run away with father. I used to think  _there_ was the romance -- leaving it all behind, cutting free from family and responsibility. Would that I could!"

"And now?"

He rolled his shoulders in a shrug. "Mother taught us a dance she learned in Kirkwall -- a dance father chanced freedom to have with her -- and here I am in the home she left behind, sharing a dance with you. Varric would call that the narrative thread. It passes from family to family. And the romance isn't the family you leave, but the family you find."

A mother passing on a memory of the city where she was born, before it became the city she where would die. A brother, eager to match his elders, before he lost his life too young on the road. A sister forgetting her fears, before her fears caught up with her and the templars took her away. A father, in the story of a stolen dance, before his story ended. And Fenris, who had nothing to add -- nothing he remembered, except a flash of red hair and a face half-familiar, a voice that told him freedom was no boon.

Fenris had looked for family without finding it. And yet --

"What are you trying to say, Hawke?" 

"Only that I'm glad I found you."

In an instant Fenris had him seized in a kiss -- a kiss to prove that Hawke was not a lyrium ghost but a thing of flesh (and tongue and teeth), that where he pushed Hawke would push back, that when he swelled forward Hawke would rush to meet him. It left him dizzy as a dance (as contact, for contact's sake). "As am I," said Fenris, in the short, breathless space between them.

"I'd gathered," Hawke said back.

Fenris bit his lower lip for that. "You can resume your lesson."

"Such a taskmaster!" But Hawke shone a smile on him, full of fondness, and pulled back with his hands still touched to Fenris's bare arms. "Here. Now let  _me_  turn  _you_  ..."


End file.
